


Desert Wind

by TrisB



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M, Genderfuck, Purple Prose, Regency Romance, Ridiculous, probably deeply problematic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-15
Updated: 2005-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-29 05:37:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrisB/pseuds/TrisB
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It is I who flank you, who is nothing without you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Desert Wind

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [These Desert Places](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/6344) by ingridmatthews. 



> Set with permission in ingridmatthew's These Desert Places, which is a deliberately purple urple Regency romance take on Battlestar Galactica if they all lived in the desert and Kara was a wooooman who riiiiides like a man!
> 
> I feel sort of gross about this now in 2012. :/

Though the desert is harsh, the swirling sands and angered sun dictate a kind of relentless grace. All is transient, fragile; the jackal dying under the full moon becomes less than a skeleton as the great crescent of the sky wanes, and in the darkest hour of the moonless night, dry bones are scattered, buried, and forgotten. So did Ali al-Adama wish to find his shame absolved, but as the new moon approached, the carcass of his pride remained, circled ominously by buzzards. And still the dust obscured the barren land.

"What troubles you on this day, Ali?" Kara asked him, digging her heels into her mare's flank.

"What troubles me? What does not, oh, Kara?" he replied bitterly. "Does not the Cylon tribe yet hound our wearied people? Does not Salu al-Tigh hold my father's counsel, nefarious though I believe his purposes to be? Does not the very water dry up and the sun hide from our approach?" He gestured at the desolate landscape, choked as it was by a sandstorm that had plagued the two for days. The simplest question of whether they headed back to their tribe at all was unanswerable in these days of hard travel.

"These are the problems that greet us daily like the sun," she said. "I had thought perhaps that a new worry weighed on your mind."

"Mundane as my woes are, I can escape them no more easily than I can determine our true path. You lead."

Kara's eyes flashed, but she said nothing and simply slapped her horse's neck. With a battle cry for flair she charged ahead, and Ali, glumly as ever, followed, for even in his despair, the folly of losing Kara too was one he felt unprepared to face.

***

  


Ensconced in twilight, Ali and Kara sat by their dinner fire, lonely though they ate together. If their direction was correct, they should make it back to camp the next day. Tribal structure would reassert itself into every aspect of their lives, but in the desolate firelight, all had fallen away.

"You fought well yesterday, Kara," Ali said, unsure even as he spoke why he was moved to do so.

"You find this remarkable?" she grinned, but all mirth died when she saw his face. "Thank you, Ali. As did you."

"I am grateful for your lies."

Kara stared. "Of what do you speak, Ali? Are you not our tribe's greatest warrior? Are you not heir to the sheik al-Adama? You lead us into battle, Ali, and without you we are nothing."

He spat bitterly. "Deceit and flattery, spun to keep our tribe as it used to be. Do not fool yourself, Kara. You are our leader. You, our great warrior. It is I who flank you, who is nothing without you." Ali's face contorted with emotion. "How often have I tried in vain to pretend that I had never wept before you, never failed to be a man!"

"You _are_ a man, Ali!" protested Kara. "You are more a man with me than anyone else!"

A gust of wind sprayed the fire with sand, and it erupted into hissing sparks for a moment before reverting back to normality.

"What do you mean?" asked Ali, quiet as the waning moon.

"I mean....Long have I struggled against these words, but they must be said, and I'll fall on my sword ere the sun rises if I must." Kara raked furiously at her hair, shorn in the fashion worn by all the other warriors, and not a pebble-length longer. "I mean, Ali, that when with you, I feel a woman, and in my eyes, never a more beautiful and true man did live. There, I have said it, and I hope you behead me for my shame." The great orphan warrior's eyes shone with passion and misery, and inside, Ali felt a series of ponderous lurches.

He said, slowly, as though discovering his feelings mere seconds before each word, "I could not behead you, nor raise my hand against you had you a sword poised against my throat. Gods help me, Kara, but I am yours, or would be, would that my shame did not consume like the desert devours carrion."

"You are right to feel shame, Prince al-Adama," said Kara stiffly. She rose to her feet and clenched her sword. "Would that it were otherwise, but it is not. So has fate decreed. I go now to end my life."

"Kara!"

She did not turn around, or give any sign of having heard, but marched away from camp with haste and dignity. Panicking, Ali scrambled from his seat and ran madly after her.

"Kara! Kara!"

He caught her then, and from her hands he wrenched the deadly sharp sword, flinging it far away. In his arms he held her, and turned her around to face him. "My love," he gasped, "my friend, my Kara, you mistake my meaning. The shame that keeps me from treating you as you deserve, as I have long desired without so much as realizing it, is not because of you. Your name, your status, your dowry mean nothing to me. I grieve that I cannot treat you as I should because, sheik's son though I may be, I am inferior in every way. I am not half the warrior a real man should be, and I will never be what my brother could have been. It pains me to say it, but Kara, I could never take you into my arms."

"Ali," said Kara, heavy with joy and sorrow, "you already have."

***

  


"I am sorry," Kara said, staring into the fire.

"Not as sorry as I," he replied, poking it moodily with a stick. "You will continue on as a warrior, of course. The tribe would be lost without you. To you, battle is as to all people breath. It would be a crime for you to not fight."

"And what of you, Ali? I meant my words. You are a noble warrior and a great man. Nothing you could ever do would bring the tribe anything but pride and honour."

"I do not feel it. Truly, I do not. In front of you I have sobbed, and by my father, there is shame. That I were the man of whom you speak, but a man I fall short of."

"Then we are the same," said Kara softly. "To the sword I gave up my maidenhood, my womanliness, and yet I cannot be a man. If I were to wed, become as a woman is to a man, my life would be over. I love you, Ali, but I cannot be other than what I am."

"Nor should you be. Your flesh is soft and frail, but your soul is one of war. This I envy."

"And is not your own soul enough for you?" she asked. "Brave and noble, working tirelessly at a life that does not suit him, but never showing signs of failure! And you encase it all in the flesh of a warrior. Are we not truly two of one sort?"

"To kiss you," he murmured, gazing at her lips, "to mingle our two tangled spirits as one...to hope that in the union of flesh, your soul would be mine to share...."

"A woman, to a man...."

Try though he might, Ali could not tear his gaze away from hers, or do anything but fill the wicked space between then. "And yet, should you act as a woman, your sword would become nothing."

"Be me not, then, a woman," whispered Kara, "and you never again a man. Only let us meet just as you and I, and who is Ali...."

"And who is Kara...."

"Can change like the winds that separated us from our tribe." She kissed him, finally, and he kissed back. And as the desert swirled around them, so did their identities; male and female, lover and loved, land and sky, protector and cherished — shifting like the sands that covered up the decay of old life, and waxing and waning like the moon that was reborn each month anew.


End file.
